Today, KDE releases a first developer snapshot of the
upcoming KDE4 release. This snapshot is meant as a reference for developers
who want to play with parts of the new technology KDE4 will provide, those
who want to start porting their applications to the new KDE4 platform and
for those that want to start to develop applications based on KDE4. This
snapshot is not for end users, there is no guarantee that it will be stable,
the interfaces are subject to changes at any time. The changes that have gone
into the development version this snapshot is based on have all happened under
the hood, little is visible yet. Now it is up to application developers to use
the new possibilities. While this snapshot will probably not be what kdelibs
will finally look like, it should give a fair idea of what to expect.

Developers can start porting their applications using this snapshot and
investigate the new exciting technology. Highlights of this snapshot include:

DBus will be the
Inter-Process-Communication protocol used for KDE 4. This snapshot contains an
initial implementation. With the use of DBus, KDE will feature improved
interoperability with other applications on the Free Desktop. Porting applications to DBus is explained on the porting wiki page.

Phonon (documentation) is another central feature of KDE4 providing a
unified multimedia backend that offers an easy way for application
developers to add multimedia capabilities to their applications.

Questions about KDE4 can be answered on various mailing lists such as kde-devel and kde-buildsystem, as
well as on #kde4-devel on irc.kde.org. Documentation for getting up to speed
with KDE4 development is available from a numberof sources.

Work is continuing on other pillars of KDE4, such as our Plasma desktop, Solid hardware layer, Oxygen artwork theme and Decibel communication architecture.

KDE development has never before been as exciting as it is today, so start
hacking today!

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Comments

I agree that if it's too much work to make it as good as the *nix version and if's going to give a bad name to KDE it shouldn't be done.

The 'sabotage' argument is nonsense IMHO. First, because if you want people to leave Windows you just have to give them something better. No free OS is there yet, even if KDE is far superior as a desktop. And second, as long as open formats are used, I couldn't care less if my neighbour uses Windows or not. Promoting Free Software and open formats in the Windows platform *is* a good thing.

There is now way, you could stop the convergence of operating systems. They are converging on several levels:

a) Virtualization. Every OS can run any other mainstream OS now.
b) Emulation. You can run Linux programs on Windows and Windows programs on Linux fairly well now.
c) Porting. More and more software starts to work on both platforms.

At the end, when people will look at things like cost, there is no way, a non-free OS can compete except where there is "piracy".

Being on Windows will attract a huge host of application developers, that will benefit KHTML (konqueror), etc. the mind share of many people is there now, and picking them up where they are, and not where they should be, is the right thing to do. Like working on Koffice :-)

When KOffice runs on Windows, this will HURT the company Microsoft so bad, you cannot imagine. OpenOffice is a monster, KOffice may just be what people want.

One has to wonder, how long people can sustain to develop costly software where there is free alternatives that are tendentially better.

And I suspect, KDE on Windows will see a influx of developers who pick up with their know how. Most of the hard issues are solved by QT already, Many of the Linuxisms have been seen in BSD and Solaris supports. So it's not going to be too bad...

The other possibility, and the more likely one, is that KDE on windows would move ahead, just due to the number of developers available there, and that KDE/*ix would get left behind. This happens with emulators that are available on both windows and *ix, such as UAE.

I am very excited to see some progress, but I must say there is little known about the plasma project. The plasma project website has been idle for some time and no one seems to post updates or screenshots on planetkde.

So my question to the developers is: Is it possible to post more preview screenshots or updates about plasma. Maybe some mockups about how it will look like and/or a technical document on functional decisions made. In my point of view, those two should be the starting point of development. It started nicely with the mockups, but which one made it and which one did not?

Maybe I'm missing some documents which are already available, but when I would've been a developer, a technical document on how it should look like would help me a lot. :)

The european union is funding a 17 million project to build a "Temor killer" and Mandriva is one of the companies working at it. All the project will be released as open source:
"the Social Semantic Desktop[...] is a new computing paradigm that provides an advanced way to create, automate and structure information. The Social Semantic Desktop brings three major changes: the availability of contextual information on users' desktops, the shift from hierarchical to semantic storage of information, and advanced ways of assisting users in their day-to-day usage of computers. One common way to define the Social Semantic Desktop is to bill it as the technologies that allow computers to gather information in the same manner as the human brain does."

oh and I forgot:
"NEPOMUK will develop a comprehensive framework for the Social Semantic Desktop and will integrate with common desktop tools and environments, including KDE, GNOME, Mozilla and Eclipse. Furthermore, NEPOMUK will actively integrate with open source user and developer communities."

gsl3 and Tenor don't appear to be the same thing. gsl3 requires YOU to tag the files, with Tenor it would be the application tagging the files (with information about the file, like for something you download off a website, Konqueror would include a tag on the file pointing to that website, for an attachment you got in an email and saved KMail would include a tag showing who sent it to you, etc). Tenor would need the applications to be modified to 'tag' the file with the extra information.

gsl3 of course let the user tag his or her files himself (BTW, what's wrong with that?), but what can stop KDE apps (or any other) to create some standard tags (e.g. KMail creates a tag "this document has been sent to you by email from ...", ...)? Maybe gsl3 does not provide the API to do this yet, but as it's Free Software, this should not be a showstopper.

gsl3 does not provide much meta data and full text filters; but KDE has them. What would be nice is a wrapper around them so gsl3 can make use of them (I think Kiten already does the same for it's various indexing backends, but I don't know if CLucene is one of them).

I know that KDE4 is still unsable and probably won't complete any benchmark tests but it would be interesting to see if the speed gains that have everyone is waiting for as the port to QT4 is largely done in the libraries at least (or so i gather).
Has anyone tried this port on their system and has there been any significant gain in speed? (I am just curious)
Hope that it is a lot quicker, not that KDE is overly sluggish on my system, but i look forward to the first alpha's or beta's of KDE4 :)